The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Advice
It is good for us to think that no grace or blessing is truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Benevolence, Kindness
The only way to realize that we are God’s children is to let Christ lead us to our Father.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christian
There is not one life which the Life-giver ever loses out of His sight; not one which sins so that He casts it away; not one which is not so near to Him that whatever touches it touches Him with sorrow or with joy.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Life
The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Assistance, Help, Service, Aid
No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God gives him He gives him for mankind.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: God, Cooperation, Greatness, Help, Greatness & Great Things
The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Humility
Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Great, Life, Rest, Decide, Act, Character, Fail
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it … you cannot do everything.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Aspirations, Goals
Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christmas
Christianity knows no truth, which is not the child of love and the parent of duty.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Truth
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God’s Paradise.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Living, Life, Doing Your Best
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Charity
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Life
The copy-books tell us that “to err is human.” That is wrong. To err is inhuman, to be holy is to live in the straight line of duty and of truth to God’s life in every intrinsic existence.
—Phillips Brooks
Prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Wishes, Prayer
If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to give healthy exercise to the charitable impulses.
—Phillips Brooks
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and pure and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Existence, Goodness, Influence
Get the pattern of your life from God, then go about your work and be yourself.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: God
O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Potential, Ability, Strength, Prayer
Christianity helps us face the music even when we don’t like the tune.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Christianity
To say, “well done” to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Praise
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Worry
Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: The Present, Future
Forgive, forget. Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours. Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Patience, Forgiveness
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Character
Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Genius
The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.
—Phillips Brooks
A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
—Phillips Brooks
Topics: Example
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sam Shoemaker American Episcopal Priest
- Edward Everett Hale American Unitarian Clergyman
- Hosea Ballou American Theologian
- Thomas Merton American Trappist Monk
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
- James Freeman Clarke American Clergyman
- Edward McKendree Bounds American Methodist Clergyman
- Frederick Buechner American Writer, Theologian
- Harry Emerson Fosdick American Baptist Minister
- Henry Ward Beecher American Protestant Clergyman
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